Trend is your friend. You will keep on hearing this from the trading gurus. Trend trading is indeed one of the most profitable trading strategies. So when you are trading a trend, you want to know how fast the trend is moving so that you can get ahead of the trend. When the rate of change of a trend goes up, it means that the prices are also going to follow and rise soon!

Now first what is a momentum? You must have read about the momentum in high school physics.Momentum was the velocity multiplied by the mass of the object. Velocity was the rate of change. So when we talk of momentum in trading, we are talking of the rate of change of any security prices. Now. a simple way to calculate the momentum of any security price is to divide the closing price today by the closing price ten days back and then multiply it by 100!

If the price went down, the momentum indicator will be less than 100 and if the price went up, the momentum indicator will be more than 100. Now, when the momentum indicator is greater than 100, the trend is expected to continue in the future. This is your shockingly simple momentum indicator that you can use profitably in your trading. Now, if the price did not change, the momentum indicator will obviously will be 100.

This momentum indicator tells you what is most likely to happen in the future not what happened in the past. So it is a leading indicator. You must have heard about momentum investing or you can even call it momentum trading. In momentum investing , you buy a security at a high price and sell it even at a more higher price unlike ordinary investing where you buy low and sell high. The trick is to know that the price will continue to rise when you do momentum investing. How do you know that the security prices will continue to rise in the future? By looking at the business fundamentals like the sales or profits, if you find them to be rising and accelerating at the same time the security price is rising,there is momentum behind this move!

As said before, instead of investing in a security or a stock you can do momentum investing. When you are doing ordinary investing, you are waiting for its price to appreciate to give you a capital gain. This price appreciation might take from a few months to even years tying down your capital in that investing. However, in momentum investing, you search for stocks that have rising prices that are expected to continue for sometime. So you buy high and sell even higher within a few weeks making a decent profit. You can use that profit to do more investing.

What a momentum investor is looking for is a security that is going to move big. But this move big is going to happen on a long term horizon instead of a few days. The expectation is to make money on the longer term. The thought is that if the security is starting to go up in price, it will keep going up in prices unless something dramatic happens to change. In the meantime, you can make a lot of money.

There are many way to do momentum investing. One is the price momentum that we have talked above. The other can be Earning Momentum. If you are a long haul investor who keeps an eye on the financial statements of different companies and you find that the quaterly earnings are going up steadily from one quater to another. What this means is that the stock price will also accelerate and follow suit.

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